One of the many things I love about visiting my uncle is the technical disconnect forced on me. He has no internet, no neighbors to even steal Wi-Fi from, and maybe one over the air TV channel. Plenty of reading and old VHS movies.

So what do you do when you have no Wikipedia or IMBD to check when you have questions about a movie you are watching? You look at books!

One my favorite movie books to flip through is a 1982 book of headshots of 1930s to 1950s characters called, “Who is That? The Late Late Viewer’s Guide to the Old Old Movie Players” By Warren B Meyers. Organized by the stock character the person played (Mothers, Femme Fatale, Business Men, Grandpas, Kids) it sort of functions as a Hall of Fame for all the familiar faces whose names you can’t quite remember. Plenty of MST3K vets in this book: Beverly Garland, Arline Judge, George Zucco, John Carrandine, Lee Van Cleef, Rondo Hatton, Nestor Paiva and, of course, Sabu. (Ok, Sabu is just a riff not a star in the MST3Kvers, but still. . .) When you resources are like this, it is understandable why the Brains thought Casey Adams was in Catalina Caper or wonder who was Merritt Stone.

The other book I love flipping through is of a much more recent vintage, but still a thick reminder of the early net days. “Video hound’s Golden Movie Retriever 2000” boast reviews and ratings for over 24,000 movies, along with other list. Nearly 1700 pages of small type for, purportedly, all movies with VHS/DVD/Laserdisc releases. Even in our age of near instant information, the scope of this book is a marvel.

A couple of MST3K related items while flipping through the pages:

There is a definite B-Movie love in the rating system (Woof to 4 bones—see, it’s a video-‘hound’. Nothing like stars at all.). Quest of the Delta Knights, The Magic Sword, Amazing Colossal Man, The Magic Voyage of Sinbad and Wild World of Batwoman all get 2 Bones. The 1st Steve Reeves Hercules gets 2 ½ Bones while Moon Men and Captive Women both rate only 1.

But you still don’t have to look hard for Woofs for MST3K featured movies. Alien from LA, Amazing Transparent Man, The Atomic Brain, Beast of Yucca Flats and Monster A-Go Go all rate the lowest possible rating.

This is the first short I’ve gone after, and it is a downer. Honestly, when watching The Amazing Transparent Man, I usually skip this short. I have even told my wife we can skip over this short when our watch through gets to this experiment.

Now I appreciate safety. Safety keeps us, well, safe. But this is like the liturgical version of Scared Straight.

The priest looks almost depressed. And it sounds like he wrote his own script too.

In the first story, about Joe and his gal, they make it hard to like a selfish guy like Joe. It isn’t just the burden on his gal and his own struggles, he put two coworkers in danger.

And not a comforting word from the priest to any of these people when he comes across them. Nope, just their tragic stories and depressed looks. Like, couldn’t the priest try to get old George and his friend’s family together to talk things over? Isn’t that what priest do?

It seems, in the ‘gentle pressure’ bit, that Charlie’s co-worker really held that torch in Charlie’s eyes. Granted, I never handled a welding torch like railroad workers would handle. Maybe your natural reaction is to bring that torch up to face level and move it back and forth.

If I drank, I’d need one now.

Watchability: 0 of 5. Trust me, stay away for your own mental health.

Missing the Riffs: 0 of 5. I don’t want to watch it with the riffs. This is my least favorite thing they watched on MST3K.